He smells rain, stone, and salt air.
The voices drift closer, pause, then continue past.
Neither of us moves.
Cold wind lashes across the cliffs, but heat radiates steadily from his body beside mine. I hate how quickly I notice it. I realize my hand is gripping the sleeve of his coat. I let go immediately.
“This changes nothing,” I say quietly. “I’m still a danger to these people.”
“Yes,” Droza says, “but you do not get to make that decision alone.”
He steps back onto the path first, scanning the road above before he moves. I follow, and the tether in my chest settles back into its familiar ache.
4
DROZA
It has been too loud since the moment I stepped back inside the common room. Chairs scrape against stone floors. Voices overlap in uneven currents of conversation and laughter. Someone drops a dish in the kitchen. A sailor near the window laughs at a volume that makes my jaw tighten.
I stand at the borders of the room with my back to the wall and count the exits the way I did during the war. Knowing the shape of a room often bought enough time to survive it.
Old habit. Useless now. There is no enemy here worth tracking.
Except that is not entirely true.
The tether pulls low and steady, a constant pressure I have spent three days learning to read like weather. Selah is calm. Above me in the upper rooms, she moves at the unhurried pace of fear temporarily leaving her thoughts. She was fearful of returning to Gullhaven, but decided to follow my lead.
The absence of her fear should be a reassurance. Instead, it feels like a different kind of distraction.
I was not built for this. I was built for open cliffs and salt wind and the silence above crowded places where danger wasspotted ahead of time. A century in stone did not prepare me for how loud living has become.
An old woman with silvery braids and dark robes finds me before I notice her approach.
She is old as coastal cliffs are old. Weathered by time and storms, and she had nothing soft left about her except the strange patience in her eyes. She plants herself in front of me without the slightest hesitation, which puts her in a category of people I can count on one hand.
“Sit down,” she says. “You’re making everyone nervous standing like that.”
“Let them be nervous.”
“Sit down anyway.”
I sit. She settles across from me and sets both hands flat on the table.
“It’s not often we have someone like you come around,” she says.
“I can see that.” Selah comes down the stairs, and my eyes are immediately drawn to her. When she sees me, she comes over. She slows when she sees the other woman at the table, but takes the seat next to me.
“I am Mother Sevra,” says the old woman with a half-smile. She studies the air between Selah and me with those clouded eyes that should not be able to see what they clearly do.
“The tether,” she says. “How long has it been?”
Selah hesitates. “A few days.”
Sevra nods once, slowly, as if this confirms something she already suspected. The noise of the common room drops away from me.
“The blood that woke you was not an accident,” Sevra says. “I heard what happened in Gullhaven. The binding that held you is older than the harbor itself. It was waiting for the correct bloodline to awaken it.”
A cold weight settles in my stomach. “It was waiting for her.”
